A city of creativity
Glastonbury is not my thing. That’s what I always said.
People are sometimes surprised that in three and a half decades of doing what I do, I’ve never performed there. But I never had, until last weekend. Now don’t get me wrong, they asked, but every year I politely declined, listing them the reasons why I thought I wasn’t the right booking. And they were real reasons. The older I get, the more I learn about myself, the more I know which situations are kind to my mental health, and which might bully it – and Glastonbury ticked a lot of the bad boxes. Being in the middle of nowhere surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people, unable to run away? Tick. Socialising with friends, colleagues and, frankly, not friends from all over the world? Tick. Camping? CAMPING? Bloody TICK.
But, apparently, what I’d been doing by saying “no thank you” annually, for decades, was playing hard to get, because they started making better and better offers. And I don’t mean monetarily, I mean emotionally. They understood my fears, and valued me enough to try to lessen them, and honestly, that alone made me much more interested.
The final straw came when they offered three things:
I could arrive the same day as my show;
I could leave the same night;
There would be good coffee waiting for me backstage.
They knew what was important to me. I said yes. And I’m glad I did.
So, if you’re unfamiliar with Glasto – or to give it its full name “The Glastonbury Festival of contemporary performing arts” – it’s, well, a city. A city that appears for one week only, on a farm in Somerset, England. A city made out of tents and caravans and food trucks and venues and fields and art installations and megalithic stone circles and overpriced beer and terrifying toilets. A city that was founded, and continues to exist, because of creativity.
The 200,000 tickets sell out almost instantaneously, and they’re not cheap. AND YOU HAVE TO CAMP. But people snap them up for one reason – whether they know it or not. I mean, sure, it’s a five-day party, and you hang out with friends, and get drunk, and get other things, and have awkward and regretful hookups in flooded tents, but the real reason it is what it is, is simple. People go to Glastonbury to see, hear, feel or whatever, something they haven’t seen, heard, felt, or whatever’d before. Something artistic.
And the beautiful part is that this is just as likely to be something like Elton John bringing thousands together in a perfect moment of everyone knowing the words to every song and sharing the now, as it might be an odd little forest glade of home-made automaton sculptures. And, of course, literally, actually, everything in between. I only had a couple of hours to wander around, and even in this short time, I saw kinetic art projects, flamenco ping-pong ball mouth jugglers, acrobats doing handstands on the roof of a cocktail bar, traditional African dance troupes, fake Australian life guards pretending the field was a swimming pool, crusty old folk singers covering Taylor Swift, a strolling Bhangra band who had become pied pipers for an ever-growing following of people lost in the drums and the dancing, a pretend grandpa with his walker decked out like a mod’s Vespa, and Blondie.
Even if you only go to Glastonbury to see Elton and wear funny sunglasses, you’ll find yourself wandering around, and you’ll discover something unplanned, that you love. There’s just too much going on, and too much wandering around required for that not to happen. The whole thing is a machine for organic artistic discovery.
Sometimes it’s easy, as someone who has eventually learned to feel alright with calling themselves an artist, to feel like it’s all a bit of an affectation. We call Imagination & Junk the “podcast about the hard work of creativity”, but occasionally, when I’m feeling less than, my mind lets those questions seep in. You know the ones: “It’s not really work though, is it? You’re not down the mines.” “I mean, is it actually of worth?” But Glastonbury shuts all that shit down really fast.
200,000 people who look forward to this all year, who barrage that website with clicks on ticket release day, with their fingers crossed so tight they turn white. All because they know that when they’re there, on top of the warm beer, pricey burritos, sunburn, mudslides, and TERRIFYING TOILETS, they’ll see some things that they haven’t seen before. Things people made.
/MR